Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

“Every loafing stream is loafing at the public expense.”

Shelling was a peaceful, mindless task, good for gossip if you had company and contemplation if you did not.

Like more than a few preachers’, they learned, his private life bore little resemblance to the one his parishioners thought he was living, and no resemblance at all to those he extolled in his sermons.

He had purchased it for twenty-five cents shortly before his wife’s death—shortly enough, in fact, that he never had to pay the twelve dollars required to renew it.

it was stunningly easy to take out insurance on other people without their knowledge, and somewhere along the line the Reverend Willie Maxwell started making a habit of it.

As early as 1782, voodoo was so feared that Louisiana’s governor, Bernardo de Gálvez, banned the purchase of slaves from Martinique, on the grounds that they “are too much given to voodooism and make the lives of the citizens unsafe.”

The only reason she would have lied for him in court, they thought, was that she had quite literally succumbed to his charms.

“They just didn’t know who all he had insurance on,” said a Coosa County resident. “They didn’t know who might be next.”

the only thing scarier than an unknown murderer is a known one.

Water, like violence, is

difficult to contain.

Anyone who criticized him, he said, was a “low-down, carpet-baggin’, scallywaggin’, race-mixin’ liar.”

If their mother could have chewed his food for him, an older sister once recalled, she would have.

He respected the opinions of those who disagreed with him, he said; he just wished they would extend the same respect to him.

The present kept sliding over the past, and the past kept slipping further down, until the truth of what had transpired in the life and death of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, elusive even as it was happening, became like the stone foundations and submerged churches and sunken graves 150 feet down in a drift of silt at the bottom of Lake Martin.

He was a peacock strutting about the globe; she was a pigeon pacing the roost.

Capote mostly wrote it on the island of Ischia, near Naples, while looking at the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, and in the shadows of Mount Etna on the island of Sicily.

She started signing letters from Monroeville as “Francesca da Rimini,” after the young Italian woman who makes Dante faint from pity when

he finds her trapped in Hell,

When it finally came time for Nelle to open her gift, the Browns pointed to an envelope hanging among the tinsel and ornaments on their tree. Inside it was a sizable check made payable to Lee, together with a note that read, “You have one year off

from your job to write whatever you please.”

It was an incredible thing. In seven years, she’d written almost nothing; in two months, she’d written an entire novel.

A day after she turned in the last section, on the last day of February, Crain sent it off to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, but an editor there rejected it a few weeks later. In April, Crain tried Harper & Brothers, but a month later they disagreed with his cover-letter claim that “Miss Lee” had written “an eye-opener for many northerners as to southern attitudes, and the reasons for them, in the segregation battle.” The day they declined, he sent the manuscript to J. B. Lippincott.

“She was a writer to the depths of her soul,” Michael Brown would later say of that astonishing year. “It would have happened with or without us—all that we did was hurry it up a little.”

Thirteen years later, Martha Beck committed a series of murders with a man she met through the classified ads, a former inmate and professed voodoo practitioner; together, they became known as “the Lonely Hearts Killers.”

For Capote, they were a story; for Lee, they were a family. She

On the next Monday, Capote paid fifty dollars each for an interview with the killers, and Lee came along.

One week later, both men came back to Dewey’s office for another interview, and another fifty dollars.

This time, they brought along the photographer Richard Avedon, best known for his fashion shoots and celebrity portraits.

And she gave Capote the gift of notes on things that had nothing to do with the murders but everything to do with the place where they occurred—its cats, customs, charlatans, and seasons. More than most field notes, hers were a book waiting to be written.

Tay Hohoff, who named him Shadrach, made him a permanent resident of her home, and later gave him prime real estate in her memoir Cats and Other People.

He was calling it Answered Prayers, a phrase Lee would’ve recognized because he’d borrowed it from Saint Teresa of Ávila: “More tears are shed over answered prayers

than unanswered ones.”

It was in that interview that Lee said of them, evocatively and enigmatically, “We are bound by a common anguish.”

From the time there were murders in America, there were writers trying to write about them.

he insisted—despite the obvious questions raised by the “novel” part—that every line of In Cold Blood was pure fact. That, in itself, was not a fact.

The Horseshoe Bend Motel

Big Tom was a man who liked to loosen his collar.

noticed what just about everyone who ever met Harper Lee did—namely, that she “didn’t care a whit about the way she looked.”

where she’d once found a rare edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the gardening section

“He might not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo,” she wrote of the Reverend, “but he had a profound and abiding belief in insurance.”

Judge C. J. Coley, a local eminence who was equal parts Pliny the Elder and Thucydides.

She might have struggled sometimes with the prose in her books, but in her letters she wrote with the ear of Eudora Welty, the eye of Walker Evans, the precision of John Donne, the wit of Dorothy Parker, and, often, the length of George Eliot.

the worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City,”

she wrote to one friend in 1990),

(“I know exactly why she did it,” she explained in 1976 of Lizzie Borden: “Anyone burdened with long petticoats and having had mutton soup for breakfast on a day like that was bound to have murdered somebody before sundown”).

director Robert Mulligan.

her letters, once Pentateuchal in their plots and Pauline in their syntax, were now short, scrawled by hand, and absent anything but the occasional and often recycled literary allusion. In the years after her stroke,